The City of Philadelphia has been selected as one of the eight winning cities to receive a $1 million grant as part of the Bloomberg Philanthropies Public Art Challenge.
This program supports temporary public art projects addressing an urgent civic issue in cities across the United States.
The funds will go towards Philadelphia's winning project titled "Healing Verse Germantown: The Streets Are Talking."
This project was created to address gun violence in Germantown - led by the City of Philadelphia's Office of Arts, Culture and the Creative Economy (OACCE), in collaboration with artistic leads Trapeta Mayson and Yolanda Wisher, and public art coordinator Rob Blackson.
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The "Healing Verse Germantown" project invites neighborhood residents of all ages to write poems through a series of workshops. These poems will then be incorporated into installations through broad partnerships with local businesses, nonprofits and community organizations.
Additionally, the project aims to engage Philadelphians through other components such as:
- Poetry workshops led by professional poets and social workers
- A weekly phone line that would feature healing poems and mental health resources
- A public art exhibition of poems
- A phone line in areas affected by gun violence
- A book archiving the project
“Our project will help Germantown community members translate their experiences with gun violence into poetry, which will be used to create public art installations in the neighborhood of Germantown,” Philadelphia Mayor Jim Kenney said in a news release. “We are confident that our public art project will help to engage and heal our communities.”
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“Poetry will be a powerful outlet for the Germantown community to collectively process and mend from experiences with gun violence,” Kelly Lee, Chief Cultural Officer for the City of Philadelphia and Executive Director of the Office of Arts, Culture and the Creative Economy Kelly Lee said in a statement.
According to OACCE, the project will be developed over the next two years. For more information visit creativephl.org.
There are additional resources for people or communities that have endured gun violence in Philadelphia. Further information can be found here.
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